There are pros and cons to this method as you might imagine. As the Persistent Spirit story begins to enter its final phase and the end of the book is on the horizon, I find myself contemplating whether I might undergo the same process for the second book, A Shot in Time.

The cons

Time: writing and recording an episode consumes 15-20 hours of effort. Maintaining that each week with an increasingly demanding and unpredictable day-job has been, frankly, stressful.

Structure: episodes have a completely different structure to a novel, requiring continuing momentum, restructured scenes, and some point of tension at the end of each one. Unedited, this brings the novel a strange, pulse-like pace which now needs a further re-write.

The pros

Progress: episodes promoted regular writing. I believe I am further along in the story than I would have been without to self imposed demands of a regular episodic production.

Story momentum: despite the structure issue mentioned above, the story has a pace and continues to move along ithout getting bogged down and sluggish. Once the “episodic pulse” is edited out I think the novel will have an enhanced page-turning pace.

Feedback: reaching out with even an unpolished story to potential audience around the globe has generated feedback that has helped both encourage the work and help shape it.

What’s in store for 2009?

Not another audio book, that’s for sure. The pros most certainly outweigh the cons, so the audio book of the second Table Rappers book must correct some of the negatives of this years’ experience. Most importantly is the frustration from being unable to produce regular, weekly episodes. Book two (titled A Shot in Time) will not be released as serialised audio until it has completed the second draft.

That does not mean there will be nothing from the Table Rappers in 2009, however. I’m planning some short story dramatised episodes, including a cast of actors, full sound effects, etc. Doesn’t that mean even more work? Yes, but the work flow can be controlled around the production, and such a project is free from an ongoing, weekly deadline.

2009 is already promising to be a challenging year on both personal and professional fronts, so careful planning will be essential to achievement of my goals. I’m thoroughly looking forward to what might prove to be a formative year for the future!

For the first few years as an aspiring stand-up comic, one must tread the rocky paths of the open spots. These are the 5 minute – or if you are lucky 10 – slots that most smaller comedy clubs make available to new comics honing their techniques.

The open spot routine goes as follows:

• Travel for 2-3 hours to the venue
• Hang around for 1-2 hours waiting for your spot
• Spend 5 minutes in front of a disinterested audience who paid to see ‘real’ comics
• Hope the club promoter saw enough promise in you to give you another spot in a few months
• Go home and re-consider any gags that did not generate a laugh

That may seem rather cynical view, but that is the process when reduced down to its core. It is genuinely much more fun that it sounds, however. These open spots are best handled by packing them with quick-fire gags and quips; fire stuff into the mic, then get the heck off. I found the minimal audience interaction very uninspiring.

So I moved into running a couple of (very) small clubs and acting as compere. The compere spends several time slots working with that night’s audience, warming them up, cooling them down, and generally creating each appropriate segue from the previous to the next act. Most importantly, there is an evolving relationship over the period of the show.

I’m getting to the point, thank you for hanging in there…

I experience a similar problem in the difference between writing a short story compared to writing a novel. But this is not centred around the act of concise writing.

I want to get to know them

Stories are about people – at least I believe mine are, regardless of their respective settings. There’s little more satisfying than learning about the characters one places into a story, understanding their nuances, discovering their quirks, ’seeing’ them play out their lives.

The short story simply does not have the space or the time for such luxuries and that is where my challenge lies. These are interesting, nay fascinating people (they must be as I am including them in my story!).

The dead end of death

This problem is particularly acute in a series of short stories I am writing and planning which will form a collection entitled “Six Deaths” – the title is something of a giveaway – and as you might guess, each character has but a brief sojourn within the pages. And there lies my personal challenge when writing shorts: I want to know these individuals, get under their skins, understand who they really are before… well, let’s just say before they up and leave.

I find writing short stories about the characters that inhabit Edwardian London in the TableRappers book(s), so very much easier and satisfying because I know them such that I do not feel I am missing out on learning about them as individuals.

It feels so utterly disrespectful to create a character for the sake of merely a few thousand words. Perhaps I just need to grow some thicker skin and be a little more ruthless with my characters. Hmm… Six Deaths, how more ruthless can one be..?